Stubborn Twig Discussion Questions
- Close your eyes, and picture an "American." Describe what you see. What does an "American" look like?
- Are there distinctly American character traits? What might they be?
- Many people in the U.S. are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. If this is true for you, how has that experience been similar or dissimilar from the Yasui family's?
- "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..." reads the plaque on the Statue of Liberty, which welcomes immigrants from across the Atlantic to the new land. Why do you think late 19th century European immigrants were welcomed to the U.S. while immigrants from Asia — specifically China and Japan — were not?
- The Japanese have been called the "model minority." Why? Many Americans of Japanese descent consider this not to be a compliment. Why might they hold this view?
- What is the American Dream Masui and Shidzuyo dreamed — and so many other milllions of immigrants dream — for themselves and their families? Did they achieve it?
- The Japanese — and many other immigrant groups — put extraordinary value on education. Why? Is their faith in education justfied?
- Imagine that you had been a neighbor of the Yasuis in 1941, a resident of a small town with a sizable Japanese American population. Imagine you went to high school with several of the Yasui children. Now the newspapers and radio are warning that the Japanese may invade the U.S. and that the people you know as neighbors may in fact be enemy agents. Whom do you believe? How do you act? What would you have done had you been alive during those days?
- Do you think Masuo Yasui was in any way responsible for his own downfall?
- Some see the internment of Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor as a regrettable consequence of wartime hysteria. Others see it as merely the most egregious incident in a long history of racism and intolerance. What are your views?
- Two metaphors have been used to describe the rich immigrant mix that is the U.S.: a melting pot and a patchwork quilt. How are these metaphors fundamentally different and what do they mean to the way we live as a society?
- Is it possible to construct a society that both honors the uniqueness of different groups and nurtures a coherent American society? What might that society look like?
- Each successive generation of an immigrant family deals differently with the process of becoming or being an American as well as the relationship between their immigrant past and their American home. What are those distinct generational differences? Can you see them in your own family?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the story of one family to illustrate the social and political history of a nation?
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